I was really jazzed to make and eat a beet salad one day—luscious beets, crunchy walnuts, and sweet cranberries on a bed of baby spinach drizzled with balsamic vinegar and oil. The realization hit me as I took my first bite: I was, quite officially, an adult. Non-adults simply don’t get excited about beet salads. By this point, I had blown by several adultish milestones without feeling like an adult: I had earned a PhD, lived with someone whom I referred to as my “partner,” paid bills and taxes, and took care of a dog. It wasn't until I felt that excitement for that beet salad, however, that I knew I had become adult.

Several readers answered the adulthood question by recalling the time they had to become a caretaker for someone who once raised them. Here’s Kate Hutton:

I’m steadily approaching 28, and I thought I was an adult when I got my first “real” job—salary, benefits, a commute to complain about—at 25. Turns out I was wrong. I don’t think I was truly an adult until I had to take care of my parents. Moving back in with my mom to help her through a new disability, staying by my father’s side through a week at the hospital, burying him unexpectedly—all in the span of a few months. You do a lot of growing up when you transition from being taken care of to a caretaker.

Another reader prefers that we “please post this anonymously so as to preserve my father’s privacy.” She recalls a grisly experience:

I think that I finally became an adult when my dad got very sick last year, when I was 25.

Previously, I had been through college, graduate school, and my first year of full-time employment and lived on my own. I had always paid my own bills and been generally self-supporting, but I relied on my parents a lot for emotional support and help with daily things, like knowing when to take my car to the mechanic or how to deal with difficult landlords. I suffer with a lot of anxiety, so I’ve been pretty emotionally needy at times.

I moved back in with my parents for a few months while I looked for an apartment. During this time, my dad—who had generally been in denial about his diabetes despite desperate pleas for him to seek medical care—took a turn for the worse. He burned his foot on a space heater, and the sore (which he kept hidden from us) slowly worsened from sore to infection to gangrene. The smell of his foot became unbearable and we realized how truly ill he was. We soon realized what was going on despite his secrecy and begged him to go to the doctor, but he violently refused.

Then one night I came downstairs and he was shivering so badly he couldn’t speak in complete phrases. I’ve never seen someone so ill in my life. It was so raw and horrific that I felt like he was slipping away as I watched. The instinct of “I need a real adult to handle this situation” kicked in, so I went to find my mother, but I soon realized that she needed me as much as I needed her. She too was paralyzed by his anger and our own fear for his life. We joined forces, begging, threatening, and bargaining with him to go to the hospital.

After an hour of screaming (between shivers and gasps), he caved in and agreed to go to the hospital. When he finally arrived, he had a temperature of 105. He was diagnosed with sepsis from the gangrene and part of his foot was amputated.

In the months that followed, he still resisted many lifestyle changes that doctors asked him to make. My mother and I had to present a united front and often had to fight with both my father and his doctors. For the first time, I realized that my parents were not in a position to handle my trivial emotional, physical, and lifestyle baggage, and so I wanted to protect them from it. I finally felt like whatever happened in my life was my own problem to solve, and also that I was capable of handling it.

Luckily my father has since recovered and my parents are doing okay again, but something in me changed that night. I handle my own issues to a much greater extent. I’ve since moved out and purchased my own home. I don’t feel like an “emerging adult” anymore; I’ve become a full adult.

A 53-year-old reader shares the “one moment that stands out in my mind” about becoming a true adult:

It was around 2009, when my mother had to move from one assisted living facility to another. She was suffering from Alzheimer’s at the time, so in a nutshell, I had to lie to her to get her in the car. The new facility had a lock-down unit, which was then the only practical option for her. It was not the first time I had told her a “white lie” in order to get her to do something, the way you might tell a child. But it was the only time I can recall when she realized I had lied to her, tricking her into leaving her apartment. She gave me a look of realization that I will never forget.

I was once married but never had children. I suppose if I had ever had children, I would have “become an adult” at some point during the parenting experience. Maybe there are certain “micro-betrayals” that go along with being responsible for someone. I don’t know. I prefer to remain ignorant about that.

The most common theme among all the emails we got from Julie’s callout involved the experience of becoming a parent. Here’s our first reader, Jack:

On a cool, rainy, Sunday morning in July 1952, I received a telephone call that the love of my life had been admitted to Bethesda Hospital in St Paul, Minnesota. She was having our first child and I had been on “Alert” at an Air Force station in Wisconsin. I drove, recklessly, to the hospital, approximately 40 miles away, and as I approached the parking area I realized for the first time I had become an adult. I was a father at 18 years old and the love of my life was 17. It is now 64 years later and we are still together.

Carol looks back 24 years:

It was 7 am on Christmas morning, 1991. I was in labor ready to deliver my first child. I couldn’t reach my parents by phone and no one knew we were at the hospital—just my husband and me. I distinctly remember thinking “this is my family now.”

Jeff Carter’s first child was also born that year:

I remember the moment of my adulthood quite vividly. I was 23. It was April 19, 1991, and I was standing in a hospital corridor. My wife at the time had to have general anesthesia for the Caesarian, in a room from which I’d been excluded. Nobody was around, and the silence was broken by the cries of a newborn. *My* newborn. My blood ran cold, and afterwards I never just did anything randomly again. My daughter and her sister figured into every decision I made and still do, even though they are both well into their 20s.

Deb Bissen remembers her momentous day:

I think I only truly felt like an adult driving home from George Washington University hospital, sitting in the back seat of our Honda Accord with our tiny, premature daughter.

While my husband drove more carefully than he ever had before, I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. I worried that she seemed much too small for her car seat, that she might suddenly stop breathing, or that her little head could tip over. I think we both couldn’t believe that we were now in charge, by ourselves, of this teeny, tiny human. Armed with our What to Expect the First Year bible, we were totally responsible for this baby’s existence, and it felt enormously overwhelming, and so grownup.

Carly Callison didn’t truly feel like an adult until her second child was born:

I was 29 years old, had been married for six years, a homeowner for almost seven years, and I had an almost two-year-old little boy. On February 22, 2009, my youngest son Wilson was born. A very easy and uneventful labor turned into a dramatic turn of events. The nurse practitioner believed he had trisomy 21 or Down Syndrome. He also had what they suspected was a heart defect.

Fast forward two days and I’m sitting in the NICU with my mom rocking my baby boy. The neonatologist came over to me and started explaining how Wilson was doing and what tests they were ordering, including an echocardiogram. After he finished speaking I looked at my mom and said “Was he talking to me or you?” She replied, “He was talking to you.”

At that moment everything changed. Decisions I never imagined considering were part of our lives now. Six and a half years later, Wilson is a thriving, healthy little boy who does have Down Syndrome. I wouldn’t change a thing, and it’s a happy memory realizing that he is responsible for me growing up.

Mike Anderson reached that threshold even before his kid was born:

I feel like I became an adult when I found out I was going to be a father. I was 23 and had been married for three years. I had a bachelor’s degree but really hadn’t started a career yet. When I knew that I had to be responsible for my child for a very, very long time, I had to stop living my life day to day; I had to plan for the next 20 or more years.

Milt Lee went the adoption route:

I think I was 23 before I started to think of myself as an adult. That was when we adopted our first child and brought him home. It was then that it was clear that my life was not just about me; it was about this little guy who needed to be cared for every day. Every hour of the day somebody had to be sure to be paying attention to him, and if it wasn’t you, then you needed to find somebody to watch him for a few hours, until you were back to keep watching him.

It’s interesting that lots of things happened to me before then that someone would think would make you feel grown up, such as getting two women pregnant, and various other things that have had a huge effect on my life (my mom died when I was 17—that was a big deal). But none of those things, or another dozen or so major events (such as getting married), felt like I was an adult. They merely made me feel like I was a dumb kid (or helpless).

P.S. I’m a documentarian, and we are working on a play and a video called “Tribe: Blood and Belonging.” My wife, Jamie Lee (she publishes under Patricia Jamie Lee) wrote a book on rites of passage (The Lonely Place) that addresses many of these issues of becoming an adult.

Here’s Matthew in D.C., a stay-at-home dad:

I would say that I really felt like an adult when I held my child in my arms for the first time. It’s when I started to deal with real compromise and financial sacrifice. It’s when I stopped living only for myself.

Before this event, I felt like an adult on and off throughout my 20s and early 30s, but never really had a grasp of the thing. When I was going to bed at a decent time and waking up on time to get to work, refreshed and ready to go, I generally felt more grown up. Yet if I started going through a bout of partying, playing lots of video games, and looking for drunken hookups, I stopped feeling like an adult. I spent most of my 20s like this, so I never really grasped the upper rings of adulthood.

Nowadays, when I very rarely wake up late in the morning with a hangover, I have brief flashes of guilt that make me feel like an irresponsible college kid again. But I power through because I don’t have choice.

That makes me think of Jim Breuer’s brilliant comedy special, “And Laughter For All,” when he talks about parenting with a hangover:

One more email on parenthood, from P.J., who merges another Notes thread:

After reading Julie’s callout for coincidences, I just so happened to be reading Hanya Yanigahara’s A Little Life before bed and came across these lines in the book describing the story's four best friends grappling with their own perceptions of adulthood:

But he and his friends have no children, and in their absence, the world sprawls before them, almost stifling with possibilities. Without them, one's status as an adult is never secure; a childless adult creates adulthood for himself, and as exhilarating as it often is, it is also a state of perpetual insecurity, or perpetual doubt.

As a non-parent, I found this description to be spot. Regardless of how many other metrics of adulthood I master, there's a societal stamp of approval as an adult that comes with having a child that will always be waiting. Until then, if ever, I'll be charting my own course, continually attempting to convince myself and others of my adulthood.

Coincidentally, Julie just posted her essay on coincidences, before I started putting this note together. A thread on your own crazy coincidences is coming soon.

We had been watching one another in the dining hall from the first day of school and finally danced together at the Halloween party. By Thanksgiving, we were an item. He was a DJ on the college radio station and took me from my hippie music to dancing wildly in his room to The Cars, The Clash, and the new Rolling Stones album. His bed was up high on the frame so we could look out the window at the mountains and meadows and watch the dawn light fill the room from under his thick duvet.

Frank went out running. He collapsed in front of the main buildings on our campus. Someone who happened to be teaching CPR at the health center came out and kept his heart beating.

He was put on life support in the hospital. I was not welcome to see him because his parents were upset that he was dating a Jewish woman. (My friends described seeing his toes sticking out from the bottom of the sheet on the hospital bed.) I was wildly pained by their rejection and stayed in my room crying.

Two days later, his life support was shut off. His sister came to pack up his room and I helped her, holding each one of his shirts up to my face and inhaling his smell. She let me keep two of his favorites—one a worn grey cotton with a red fist that he had slept in just a few night earlier, with me snuggled up by his side.

She and I cried together, and she told me that the pain for her parents was terrible. She said, “No parent should ever have to bury a child.” I was so angry that her words didn’t penetrate.

I didn’t go to the wake, but I did go to the church service and then to the funeral, which was held beneath a tent on a cold and rainy afternoon. His parents welcomed his friends and ignored me. I stayed back a few rows, not wanting to make things anymore horrible than they already were.

At the end of the prayers, his sister walked back through the crowd to find me and handed me a white rose to put on the coffin. When I pressed that flower to the polished wood and said my goodbyes, I thought about what K. had said about her parents grief. They were holding one another up, still standing at the edge of the tent, reluctant to leave their baby.

I understood and I forgave them. And in doing so, I left my childhood behind.

I became an adult after my first marriage ended. Up until that point, I was living my life in service to and at the direction of my husband, my father, my mother, and every other figure of authority that moved through my world. When my marriage ended I was faced with the reality that those to whom I had I trusted my life had not actually agreed to accept that responsibility.

It took another year and a half to fully grasp what this meant. January 4, 2010. The day I broke. This is also the day that I found my bootstraps, grew up, and moved into adulthood. Today I have designed a lovely life that looks and feels and sounds and behaves exactly like me.

From a woman in her early 30s:

I was always a tiny adult from a young age—an only child of an only child, with a single mother who herself was the daughter of a single mother. I related better to adults than children and couldn’t wait to grow up. I knew what all the signifiers were, and I was on track to attain them all.

I moved away from home to attend college, graduated college, and moved to the big city to get on with my life. I got a job that turned into a career. I went to graduate school. I bought a little bachelorette pad, got a dog, and my career took off.

I met someone, and married him. We bought a bigger house. But every single day, I woke up feeling like a child in an adult body. “Who let me make million dollar decisions? Who are these fools who pay me to advise them? Don’t they know I still eat potato chip sandwiches and would rather be in sweatpants?” I felt like an imposter despite my credentials and evidence that I was as adult as anyone else.

Then my marriage crumbled under the weight of his addiction and we separated. When I told my friends, I learned that I had been a better imposter than I realized: No one had any idea that my he was an addict, that our marriage was troubled, that I was unhappy. I put so much effort into faking it that there was no energy left to make it.

When the divorce was finalized, I looked at what I had left: friends who supported me no matter what, a career that was taking off despite personal setbacks, the house I kept, my dog, my ever-supportive family. And I realized that I didn’t have the interest or energy or time to fake anything anymore.

I had to be brought to my knees to realize that I could just be me. When I finally stopped building an image of myself for public consumption, I learned authenticity—and with it, true adulthood, inside and out.

This reader seems on the verge of divorce:

I’m an obgyn and I watch women struggle through many life changes. I see my late teen and early 20s patients acting more grown up and thinking they “know it all.” I see my patients learning to be new moms and wishing they had a guide book, feeling lost. I see women through divorce and trying to find themselves afterwards. I see them trying to hold onto youth during menopause and after. I see them embarrassed to be incontinent in their later years or embarrassed they have to use a walker. As a result, I have been reflecting for a while on this very topic of “becoming an adult.”

I am a mom, have three kids in elementary, married (unhappily unfortunately), and I still feel like I’m growing up. My spouse cheated on me—that was a wake up call. I started asking myself “what do YOU want?” and “what makes YOU happy?” I think I had gone through life not questioning many things along the way.

As a 40-year-old woman, I feel like this is the time I’m becoming an adult—it’s now, but it hasn’t completely happened yet. During my marital conflicts I started therapy (I wish I had done this in my 20s). It’s now that I'm learning, really learning, who I am. I don’t know if I will stay married. I don’t know how that will look for my kids or for me down the line. I suspect that if I leave, then I will feel like an adult, because then I did something for ME.

I think the answer to “When do you become an adult?” has to do with when you finally accept yourself. My patients who are trying to stop time through menopause don’t seem like adults even though they are in their mid-40s and mid-50s. My patients who seem secure through any of life struggles—those are the women who seem like adults. They still have a young soul but roll with all the changes, accepting the undesirable changes in their bodies, accepting the lack of sleep with their children, accepting the things they cannot change.

My men and I had spent the last two days driving from Kuwait to just north of Baghdad and had arrived at Taji the previous night. It was too dark to move into our CHUs—the metal trailers we would live in for the next year—so we’d spent the previous night on our vehicles.

On the morning of the seventh, me and everybody else in the unit were unpacking our gear and moving it into our rooms. I was in a fellow lieutenant’s trailer, complaining about something insignificant that I can’t remember, when it happened: a whump that shook the ground and made all the metal walls flex. We poked our head out the trailer—just like everyone else in the unit—as if we couldn’t believe what we’d just heard. In retrospect, of course it was a rocket or a mortar, but even though we’d been relentlessly trained how to respond, the first time it happened, everyone just stared at each other in disbelief.

For about three seconds.

When the next one landed—even closer this time—the ear splitting boom was accompanied by the zip-ping of shrapnel as it lanced through our metal trailers. We all flinched, and then there was the sound of feet scurrying on gravel and shouts of “Incoming! Incoming!”

I found myself—I don’t even remember running—in the middle of the low, U-shaped concrete bunker on the north side of our trailers, along with at least 20 other soldiers, pressed together in the sweat and heat and fear, staring at the whites of each other’s bulging eyes. At the east end, farthest from me, two medics were already crouched down whispering and cursing to each other, working on a soldier who was laying on his back in the gravel just inside the bunker entrance.
A sergeant and a soldier dragged another soldier in to the west entrance, closest to me, and shouted “Medic! Medic, goddamn it, we need a medic!”

“I’m already down here, working on him!” came one of the medic’s shouted replies from the eastern end. There were so many people in the bunker and it was so low, the medic had no idea the soldiers nearest me were calling for help for a different soldier.

“No, I need another one!”

The whole bunker went quiet while everybody processed what that meant. The second soldier they’d dragged in was a color of pale green I’d only seen described in books. I stood in the bunker, pressed among my men, with a dying man on my left and a dead one to my right.

I was 23 and had never seen a man die.

It was there, that day in Iraq, that I became a man. It wasn’t the four years I’d spent at West Point, not being commissioned as a lieutenant, not my time in training, not even when I’d married my wife right before deployment. No, it was there when I really realized that life was a short, fragile thing, and that its end can come like lighting out of clear blue sky, whether in the US or in Iraq.

I understood that my charmed American life up to that point had been a blissful extended childhood compared to what was coming next. It was then that I was an adult, because in a flash I understood that what I had thought normal before was instead an aberration, and that violence and hate and blood was what the rest of the world lived on a daily basis. I entered the bunker a wide-eyed child and came out aged a 100 years.

My parents and I just assumed I was mentally ill, lazy, and/or a bad person. I thought if I found the right psych drug cocktail or figured out what I was doing wrong, I’d be better and like everyone else.

I wasn’t diagnosed as autistic until about a year and a half ago (although I suspected I might be autistic before that). I was kind of scared of getting a definitive diagnosis, honestly. Psych problems are fixable; autism isn’t.

Diagnosis has really improved my life. An autism diagnosis means accepting the things I cannot change. (I’ve written a little about it here.) It’s OK that I can’t do some things my peers do, or that those things come easily to them but not to me. It doesn’t make me a bad person; it just means I have a disability.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve continued to have trouble doing a lot of “adult” things. I’ve just come to accept that I’m a different kind of adult instead of berating myself about it. I’m happier, healthier, and much better at dealing with problems.

Sometimes I get disappointed in myself that I’m 26 and just starting my career. My friends from college are doctors, lawyers, managers, founders of nonprofits, and distinguished researchers. I’m an assistant. My friends are getting engaged or married. I’m living with a partner for the first time.

I’m 33. I’ve been married for eight years. My kids are nearly seven and four-and-a-half. I’ve had three “real,” “good” jobs. I’ve moved across the country twice with babies. I’ve bought and sold three homes.

Yet it was only this year that I started feeling like an adult. I fell in love with one of my friends. I came out of the closet.

I realized my needs conflicted with those of my family in a way that was more substantial than the everyday exhaustion I had learned to handle. I understood, for the first time, that sometimes there really are no perfect solutions, and I started to see that everywhere in my life. I realized everyone has needs that aren’t being met. Everyone is a little bit broken. All of those people who hurt me in my life were probably doing the best they could. I can hurt people. The best I can do sometimes is to minimize the damage, to apologize when apologies are due, to offer empathy and validation of others’ perspectives.

My husband and I decided to stay together. I understood over time that I was bisexual, but there was a very long moment when I was not sure. I feel like I grew up in that moment.

Adulthood happened very early for me—the change, that is; that moment in time when you stop seeing the world around you as a big playground and you realize that it’s a minefield.

It was April 1985 in communist Albania. Our dictator, Enver Hoxha, had just passed away. I was 11 years old, in 5th grade, and as part of the youth leadership group of my middle school, I was asked to participate in the wake for our leader.

This meant waking up at 6am, lining up in the main boulevard of our capital city, Tirana, and walking slowly the line that snaked through the road all the way to the official building that houses the body of the dead dictator. I was there with a few teachers and a group of students ages 10-18. We knew we had to be serious and sad and cry often, but we didn’t know how long it would take and what a wake involved.

It took us a few hours before we got close to the building, but we didn’t realize that we would walk around the actual body of the dead. I remember in a blur the low lights, the big mound in the center of the room, flowers piled everywhere, but mostly the smell—sharp, chemical, rotting flowers and the faint smell of rotting flesh. I walked quickly in a daze, looking for the escape of the sun and fresh air outside.

As I am leaving a building, a reporter catches my eye and stops me. He said he wants to interview me and ask me questions about my impressions of the wake and my reaction to the death of our leader. I was confused and asked him what he wanted me to say. He said: “Well, say something about how you have met him when he was alive and how you’ll miss him now that he is gone and how he will live forever in our hearts and conclude with ‘farewell comrade Enver.’” Wanting to leave and join my friends, I quickly blurted out the lines in front of the camera and left.

When I arrived home about an hour later, I learned that my interview had been broadcast on the sole national TV channel. My grandmother said, “You spoke nicely but you didn’t look sad.”

I didn’t think much of it. I was anxious to see my mother, as I was tired and hadn’t seen her since early that morning and she was late from work. My mother came home three hours late. I ran to meet her but she stopped me before I had a chance to hug her, held me firmly by my shoulders and said, in the loudest voice I’d ever heard from her, “Never, ever go on national television again and never ever talk about political things with anyone.” She then hugged me tightly and started crying.

I learned that after my interview had been broadcasted on TV, everyone had seen it, since it was obligatory to follow the ceremony, even while at work. The representative of the communist party in my mother’s work place had seen it and had not been impressed by the fact that I didn’t cry. I didn’t show appropriate emotion for our leader’s death.

So, the natural answer was that my mother was a bad parent who hadn’t taught her daughter the appropriate emotional sentiment for the esteemed members of the party. He had called a political meeting right then and there, where the subject was my mother and her adherence to the communist principles as seen via her parenting skills. The meeting lasted three straight hours.

I thought she would be sent to jail or to a work camp and that I’d never see her again. Luckily, she was the first female surgeon of Albania and a very skilled one at that, so they spared her.

That’s the theme shared by these two readers. The first was in his early 40s when this happened:

I became an adult in December 2009, when I was stopped for a minor speeding infraction with a friend of mine after a night of drinking. Having no license, I decided in a moment of bluster to take off rather than take the ticket. I went on a 1.2 mile “high-speed” chase at 56 mph through downtown Brattleboro, Vermont.

But I quickly decided that I was out of my mind and pulled into the restaurant where I managed, parking my vehicle. Since I didn’t want to get my new clothes all nasty on the ground, I got up rather than stay down on the ground, as per the officer’s directions—and was summarily tased, twice.

Four years of Christian college, $60,000 a year job, a homeowner for 13 years, $25,000 lawyer’s fees … all of it disappeared that moment. I spent five years in prison. That’s when I knew I became an adult: the day I walked into prison.

The other reader, Brandon, also got into major trouble with alcohol:

I became an adult when I no longer trusted my own infallibility and survived.

I graduated top 10 in my high school, was accepted to a prestigious university, graduated top 10 in my undergrad class, and top 10 in my class in Officer Candidate School for the Marine Corps. Despite the warnings, the brushes with arrogance, I still felt that I couldn’t fail.

I have no story of cowardice or bravery under fire, where I saved myself and failed others or vice versa. My fall was precipitated by the number one source of problems in the U.S. armed forces: alcohol. I made a decision, thoroughly inebriated yet fully cognizant of the consequences, assured in my belief that my luck, my skills, my élan, and my infallibility would see me through.

When I awoke, I was arrested and charged with a felony. My career in the military was over—and potentially any civilian career as well, if I spent time in prison. Yet my luck had not completely deserted me: All charges were dropped when I fell on my sword and resigned my commission. I left the service three short months later, still shocked and disbelieving the sudden, violently necessity of a life after the Corps.

It’s been six years since that night, and not a day passes without the bitterness, the frustration with my younger self, the anguish at opportunities lost. But I never curse my luck. My fallible nature had been lurking just out of sight, and instead of ensuring that it never emerged, I tempted it—doggedly, arrogantly convinced that I was greater.

Now I drift, searching for something else for my entire life to be about. I have a small business that I’m excited to launch in 2016, I am otherwise relatively successful, nearly debt free, usually sober, and most importantly, I love and am loved. But my élan is gone.

Hemingway famously wrote, “The world breaks everyone, and those it cannot break, it kills.” As embarrassing as it is to admit, I broke myself at 24.

Last month, Julie wrote an essay exploring the question “When Are You Really an Adult?” Biological development, legal thresholds, and cultural touchstones all play a role in her piece, but the question is essentially a subjective one—or as Julie puts it, “Adulthood is a social construct.” She broached the question with readers and got a ton of your emails, filled with eloquent stories and insights, and we will air them over the next few weeks. The first comes from a college senior:

I think I became an adult at 17. Yes, I had gone through puberty. Yes, I had boyfriends. Yes, I had jobs. But none of those traits specifically defined my adulthood.

In July of 2011, my father took a job in Arizona, leaving me and my sister alone. My mother has paranoid schizophrenia, and at the time she lived in upstate New York. (My parents are divorced.) I’m the oldest child, so I always assumed responsibility for my younger sister growing up. But that July, a responsibility I was not prepared to handle hit me in the face.

I’ll never forget the day, because for some reason I was up at 8am on a Tuesday. My sister was in summer school. After finishing a shower, I checked my phone to find a missed call. My high school nurse had left a message saying there was an emergency and that I needed to go to the school.

I get there to find my sister curled up in a ball in one of the patient rooms. A few police officers are there as well. The nurse tells me that my sister has hasn’t eaten any food in days and is close to dying and needs to go to the hospital. Because I was only 17 at the time, I did not have the legal authority to sign as my sister’s guardian. We had no one.

So my school called someone at Child Protective Services and they signed as my sister’s guardian. I remember sleeping in the emergency room with her as we waited for her to be admitted. I remember thinking how much I loved my little sister.

A few days later, I visited my sister in the hospital. The situation was terrible to begin with because she was in a psychiatric ward and you had to be 18+ to come during visiting hours, so they needed to schedule time separately during the day for me to see her. I’m in a room with the doctor and a man I’ve never seen before. He introduced himself as Mike and that he was assigned as my social worker. Perplexed, I asked why I’ve been assigned a social worker. He tells me that the Division of Youth and Family Services is investigating my father for child abandonment.

Everything that happened that week changed me forever. Life was no longer was about me; it was about my younger sister; it was about my sick mother; it was about my surroundings. I sat through meetings with councilors and doctors, with people telling me that the way I was raised was not normal, that the abuse was not acceptable.

I knew I was an adult at that moment because I remember being sad for a little bit—but I remember trying to keep everything together so my sister could come home. I remember sneaking in Sour Patch Kids and a cell phone so we could communicate. I remember trying to make a plan. I remember bouncing back and moving on—and I think that makes someone an adult.

I’m so blessed today to still have my sister by my side, at a healthy weight, in college. I felt like a proud parent, cheering when she got to 80 pounds, 90 pounds, 100 pounds, 110 pounds! Love really has the power to change lives, and the love I have for my younger sister changed me. It made me become an adult.

Julie explores that question at length in her popular new essay. Interspersed throughout the essay are excerpts from readers reflecting on adulthood, derived from a callout Julie made last month. About 150 of your emails arrived in our inbox and we carefully read through all of them to organize by theme and post the most compelling ones. To start off our series, here’s Rachel Mattingly:

I still remember the moment I first felt like an adult. Nothing particularly interesting was happening. I was sitting in the back of a car, admiring the scenery while being driven to a good hiking spot. I was just over 18; it was October, and my birthday had been in June.

The car was being driven by my host-grandparents while I was spending a year as an exchange student in Germany. I had already graduated from high school in the U.S., so I wasn’t there for the grades; I just wanted to see more of the world. I had grown a lot in the previous two years after leaving my parents’ house to go to a public residential school. It was the first time I’d really encountered people from different backgrounds and beliefs, and it had challenged me personally even more than it had academically.

In the back of that car, something clicked. I felt like some of the emotional chaos I had gone through over the previous two years as I lost my faith and struggled to find my place in the world was subsiding. Instead of feeling like I was in transition, busy becoming someone, I felt like I finally just was.

Another reader:

I went home for Christmas one year. It was the first time I had been able to afford non-crappy presents for everyone. My little brother and I went out to the bar and were comparing our health insurance and retirement plans. That’s when I first had the thought, “Oh shit, I’m an adult!”

Another ah-ha moment:

I was writing out a grocery list with my husband. I was six months pregnant, though I didn’t own a home or even a car. “Wow, I feel like such an adult right now.” It was definitely an epiphany moment.

I think the moment you realize you are an adult is the moment you had always imagined it to be. Or what you saw as a child—all the adult-like things people did. How cool it seemed. Well, here we are, discussing our vegetable preferences, and it isn’t half bad.

This reader takes a more dramatic turn:

I was born on January 30, 1967, but I didn’t become an adult until July 23, 1999, when my wife took our child and left me in the middle of the night. Reading the note she left on the kitchen counter was the first of many things I did as a grown up, including therapy, numerous reconciliations and split ups, single fatherhood, middle-aged online dating, achieving licensure as a professional engineer, running for elected office, remarrying and adopting a child from Haiti, becoming a published author, and admitting all these things to The Atlantic.

Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president?

On a cold March afternoon in 1949, Wolfgang Leonhard slipped out of the East German Communist Party Secretariat, hurried home, packed what few warm clothes he could fit into a small briefcase, and then walked to a telephone box to call his mother. “My article will be finished this evening,” he told her. That was the code they had agreed on in advance. It meant that he was escaping the country, at great risk to his life.

Though only 28 years old at the time, Leonhard stood at the pinnacle of the new East German elite. The son of German Communists, he had been educated in the Soviet Union, trained in special schools during the war, and brought back to Berlin from Moscow in May 1945, on the same airplane that carried Walter Ulbricht, the leader of what would soon become the East German Communist Party.

The best way to grasp the magnitude of what we’re seeing is to look for precedents abroad.

Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump has indulged his authoritarian instincts—and now he’s meeting the common fate of autocrats whose people turn against them. What the United States is witnessing is less like the chaos of 1968, which further divided a nation, and more like the nonviolent movements that earned broad societal support in places such as Serbia, Ukraine, and Tunisia, and swept away the dictatorial likes of Milošević, Yanukovych, and Ben Ali.

The disease’s “long-haulers” have endured relentless waves of debilitating symptoms—and disbelief from doctors and friends.

For Vonny LeClerc, day one was March 16.

Hours after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson instated stringent social-distancing measures to halt the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, LeClerc, a Glasgow-based journalist, arrived home feeling shivery and flushed. Over the next few days, she developed a cough, chest pain, aching joints, and a prickling sensation on her skin. After a week of bed rest, she started improving. But on day 12, every old symptom returned, amplified and with reinforcements: She spiked an intermittent fever, lost her sense of taste and smell, and struggled to breathe.

When I spoke with LeClerc on day 66, she was still experiencing waves of symptoms. “Before this, I was a fit, healthy 32-year-old,” she said. “Now I’ve been reduced to not being able to stand up in the shower without feeling fatigued. I’ve tried going to the supermarket and I’m in bed for days afterwards. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.” Despite her best efforts, LeClerc has not been able to get a test, but “every doctor I’ve spoken to says there’s no shadow of a doubt that this has been COVID,” she said. Today is day 80.

In an extraordinary condemnation, the former defense secretary backs protesters and says the president is trying to turn Americans against one another.

James Mattis, the esteemed Marine general who resigned as secretary of defense in December 2018 to protest Donald Trump’s Syria policy, has, ever since, kept studiously silent about Trump’s performance as president. But he has now broken his silence, writing an extraordinary broadside in which he denounces the president for dividing the nation, and accuses him of ordering the U.S. military to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens.

“I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled,” Mattis writes. “The words ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.” He goes on, “We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.”

As China comes into greater conflict with the West, now is a good time to consider the long arc of the relationship.

As China comes into greater conflict with the West, and the United States in particular, now is a good time to consider the long arc of this relationship. In the West, Chinese history is commonly framed as having begun with the first Opium War, giving the impression that European powers always had the upper hand. But from the first direct contact between East and West—the arrival of the Portuguese in south China in the early 16th century—the Chinese were dominant.

In 1517, they appeared near the famed trading haven of Guangzhou, strange and unruly barbarians in wooden sailing ships. The language they spoke was an unintelligible mystery, their eight vessels puny by the standards of Zheng He’s treasure junks, and their ultimate origins a bit hazy. But like all other seaborne ruffians, they wanted to trade for the rich silks and the other wonders of China. The Chinese came to call them folangji, a generic term used at the time to refer to Europeans. More specifically, they were the Portuguese, and they were the first Europeans to sail all the way to China.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the law.

In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state.

When Grover Cleveland clinched the Democratic nomination and faced an allegation of misconduct, he wrote up a new political playbook.

The 2020 presidential campaign features two politicians accused of sexual assault, both of whom are nearly certain to secure their parties’ nominations. That fact isn’t as surprising as it may seem. More than a century ago, another future president managed to not only survive a sexual-misconduct scandal, but turn it to his advantage. That story tells us a lot about American politics—what’s changed about the public response to such allegations, and what hasn’t.

On a humid July evening in 1884, Grover Cleveland clambered onto the next-to-last rung of the American political ladder. He became the brand-new Democratic nominee for the presidency of the United States—and instantly had to defend himself against an accusation of sexual misconduct.

If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. You would look like any other American. You could be a mother, picking leftovers off your toddler’s plate. You could be the young man in headphones across the street. You could be a bookkeeper, a dentist, a grandmother icing cupcakes in her kitchen. You may well have an affiliation with an evangelical church. But you are hard to identify just from the way you look—which is good, because someday soon dark forces may try to track you down. You understand this sounds crazy, but you don’t care. You know that a small group of manipulators, operating in the shadows, pull the planet’s strings. You know that they are powerful enough to abuse children without fear of retribution. You know that the mainstream media are their handmaidens, in partnership with Hillary Clinton and the secretive denizens of the deep state. You know that only Donald Trump stands between you and a damned and ravaged world.

Demonstrators are hammering on a hollowed-out structure, and it very well may collapse.

The urban unrest of the mid-to-late 1960s was more intense than the days and nights of protest since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis policeman. More people died then, more buildings were gutted, more businesses were ransacked. But those years had one advantage over the present. America was coming apart at the seams, but it still had seams. The streets were filled with demonstrators raging against the “system,” but there was still a system to tear down. Its institutions were basically intact. A few leaders, in and outside government, even exercised some moral authority.

In July 1967, immediately after the riots in Newark and Detroit, President Lyndon B. Johnson created a commission to study the causes and prevention of urban unrest. The Kerner Commission—named for its chairman, Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois—was an emblem of its moment. It didn’t look the way it would today. Just two of the 11 members were black (Roy Wilkins, the leader of the NAACP, and Edward Brooke, a Republican senator from Massachusetts); only one was a woman. The commission was also bipartisan, including a couple of liberal Republicans, a conservative congressman from Ohio with a strong commitment to civil rights, and representatives from business and labor. It reflected a society that was deeply unjust but still in possession of the tools of self-correction.

It sickened me yesterday to see security personnel—including members of the National Guard—forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president's visit outside St. John's Church. I have to date been reticent to speak out on issues surrounding President Trump's leadership, but we are at an inflection point, and the events of the past few weeks have made it impossible to remain silent.

Whatever Trump's goal in conducting his visit, he laid bare his disdain for the rights of peaceful protest in this country, gave succor to the leaders of other countries who take comfort in our domestic strife, and risked further politicizing the men and women of our armed forces.

Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president?

On a cold March afternoon in 1949, Wolfgang Leonhard slipped out of the East German Communist Party Secretariat, hurried home, packed what few warm clothes he could fit into a small briefcase, and then walked to a telephone box to call his mother. “My article will be finished this evening,” he told her. That was the code they had agreed on in advance. It meant that he was escaping the country, at great risk to his life.

Though only 28 years old at the time, Leonhard stood at the pinnacle of the new East German elite. The son of German Communists, he had been educated in the Soviet Union, trained in special schools during the war, and brought back to Berlin from Moscow in May 1945, on the same airplane that carried Walter Ulbricht, the leader of what would soon become the East German Communist Party.

The best way to grasp the magnitude of what we’re seeing is to look for precedents abroad.

Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump has indulged his authoritarian instincts—and now he’s meeting the common fate of autocrats whose people turn against them. What the United States is witnessing is less like the chaos of 1968, which further divided a nation, and more like the nonviolent movements that earned broad societal support in places such as Serbia, Ukraine, and Tunisia, and swept away the dictatorial likes of Milošević, Yanukovych, and Ben Ali.

The disease’s “long-haulers” have endured relentless waves of debilitating symptoms—and disbelief from doctors and friends.

For Vonny LeClerc, day one was March 16.

Hours after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson instated stringent social-distancing measures to halt the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, LeClerc, a Glasgow-based journalist, arrived home feeling shivery and flushed. Over the next few days, she developed a cough, chest pain, aching joints, and a prickling sensation on her skin. After a week of bed rest, she started improving. But on day 12, every old symptom returned, amplified and with reinforcements: She spiked an intermittent fever, lost her sense of taste and smell, and struggled to breathe.

When I spoke with LeClerc on day 66, she was still experiencing waves of symptoms. “Before this, I was a fit, healthy 32-year-old,” she said. “Now I’ve been reduced to not being able to stand up in the shower without feeling fatigued. I’ve tried going to the supermarket and I’m in bed for days afterwards. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.” Despite her best efforts, LeClerc has not been able to get a test, but “every doctor I’ve spoken to says there’s no shadow of a doubt that this has been COVID,” she said. Today is day 80.

In an extraordinary condemnation, the former defense secretary backs protesters and says the president is trying to turn Americans against one another.

James Mattis, the esteemed Marine general who resigned as secretary of defense in December 2018 to protest Donald Trump’s Syria policy, has, ever since, kept studiously silent about Trump’s performance as president. But he has now broken his silence, writing an extraordinary broadside in which he denounces the president for dividing the nation, and accuses him of ordering the U.S. military to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens.

“I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled,” Mattis writes. “The words ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.” He goes on, “We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.”

As China comes into greater conflict with the West, now is a good time to consider the long arc of the relationship.

As China comes into greater conflict with the West, and the United States in particular, now is a good time to consider the long arc of this relationship. In the West, Chinese history is commonly framed as having begun with the first Opium War, giving the impression that European powers always had the upper hand. But from the first direct contact between East and West—the arrival of the Portuguese in south China in the early 16th century—the Chinese were dominant.

In 1517, they appeared near the famed trading haven of Guangzhou, strange and unruly barbarians in wooden sailing ships. The language they spoke was an unintelligible mystery, their eight vessels puny by the standards of Zheng He’s treasure junks, and their ultimate origins a bit hazy. But like all other seaborne ruffians, they wanted to trade for the rich silks and the other wonders of China. The Chinese came to call them folangji, a generic term used at the time to refer to Europeans. More specifically, they were the Portuguese, and they were the first Europeans to sail all the way to China.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the law.

In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state.

When Grover Cleveland clinched the Democratic nomination and faced an allegation of misconduct, he wrote up a new political playbook.

The 2020 presidential campaign features two politicians accused of sexual assault, both of whom are nearly certain to secure their parties’ nominations. That fact isn’t as surprising as it may seem. More than a century ago, another future president managed to not only survive a sexual-misconduct scandal, but turn it to his advantage. That story tells us a lot about American politics—what’s changed about the public response to such allegations, and what hasn’t.

On a humid July evening in 1884, Grover Cleveland clambered onto the next-to-last rung of the American political ladder. He became the brand-new Democratic nominee for the presidency of the United States—and instantly had to defend himself against an accusation of sexual misconduct.

If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. You would look like any other American. You could be a mother, picking leftovers off your toddler’s plate. You could be the young man in headphones across the street. You could be a bookkeeper, a dentist, a grandmother icing cupcakes in her kitchen. You may well have an affiliation with an evangelical church. But you are hard to identify just from the way you look—which is good, because someday soon dark forces may try to track you down. You understand this sounds crazy, but you don’t care. You know that a small group of manipulators, operating in the shadows, pull the planet’s strings. You know that they are powerful enough to abuse children without fear of retribution. You know that the mainstream media are their handmaidens, in partnership with Hillary Clinton and the secretive denizens of the deep state. You know that only Donald Trump stands between you and a damned and ravaged world.

Demonstrators are hammering on a hollowed-out structure, and it very well may collapse.

The urban unrest of the mid-to-late 1960s was more intense than the days and nights of protest since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis policeman. More people died then, more buildings were gutted, more businesses were ransacked. But those years had one advantage over the present. America was coming apart at the seams, but it still had seams. The streets were filled with demonstrators raging against the “system,” but there was still a system to tear down. Its institutions were basically intact. A few leaders, in and outside government, even exercised some moral authority.

In July 1967, immediately after the riots in Newark and Detroit, President Lyndon B. Johnson created a commission to study the causes and prevention of urban unrest. The Kerner Commission—named for its chairman, Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois—was an emblem of its moment. It didn’t look the way it would today. Just two of the 11 members were black (Roy Wilkins, the leader of the NAACP, and Edward Brooke, a Republican senator from Massachusetts); only one was a woman. The commission was also bipartisan, including a couple of liberal Republicans, a conservative congressman from Ohio with a strong commitment to civil rights, and representatives from business and labor. It reflected a society that was deeply unjust but still in possession of the tools of self-correction.

It sickened me yesterday to see security personnel—including members of the National Guard—forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president's visit outside St. John's Church. I have to date been reticent to speak out on issues surrounding President Trump's leadership, but we are at an inflection point, and the events of the past few weeks have made it impossible to remain silent.

Whatever Trump's goal in conducting his visit, he laid bare his disdain for the rights of peaceful protest in this country, gave succor to the leaders of other countries who take comfort in our domestic strife, and risked further politicizing the men and women of our armed forces.